Oriana Bandiera

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She is also a Professor of Economics at the LSE and the Director of STICERD. She is a member of IZA, CEPR, BREAD, EUDN and JPAL-Europe. Her primary research interests are in labour economics, development economics, and the economics of organisations. In 2007 she was jointly awarded the IZA Young Labor Economist Prize. She is an editor of the BE Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy and on the board of the Journal of Economic Literature. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. She is the 2011 recipient of Carlo Alberto medal, awarded biennally to an Italian economist under the age of 40 for “outstanding research contributions to the field of economics.”

Blog post

Procurement decision making and access to information
“Procurement decisions take up 20-25% of my time in a week, and given my other obligations, I cannot afford to spend more time on this activity”, explains Mr. Ashraf, an Executive Engineer in the Communication and Works Department in Punjab. His task at hand today is to procure more printing paper for his subsidiary...

Publication - Growth Brief

This brief synthesises lessons from the latest research on strategies to improve the performance of public sector workers, including government administrators and frontline service providers, such as teachers and health workers. The focus is on strategies for recruiting and motivating the public sector workforce.

Publications Reader Item

Project

Public procurement systems are essential in facilitating government investments in infrastructure, health, education, and other public services. In developing countries, high rates of corruption and leakage may lower the efficiency of government procurement, potentially reducing the value generated by money spent.
Following on from a previous IGC-funded project...

26 Jan 2017 | Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat, Michael Best

Project

The provision of public services depends critically on the skills and motivation of the agents tasked with providing them. And yet, civil servant underperformance plagues many countries, with cross-national studies reporting average daily absenteeism rates among public health workers and teachers of 19 and 35 percent, respectively.
This project covers the initial steps...

19 Oct 2016 | Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Torsten Figueiredo Walter

Publications Reader Item

Project

A major challenge faced by government in low-income countries is how to reduce poverty in a sustainable way. Recent evidence suggests that the “Targeting the Ultrapoor” (TUP) program pioneered by BRAC in Bangladesh has proven very effective and portable across diverse low-income settings. As a consequence, up to 30 governments were piloting variants of TUP by the end...

Project

This is a follow-up project from Recruiting and motivating health workers in Zambia.
We study how career incentives affect who selects into public health jobs and, through selection, their performance while in service. We collaborate with the Government of Zambia to design a field experiment embedded in the national recruitment campaign for a new health worker...

Project

A decentralised public service is widely perceived to more effectively respond to local community needs. As in other post-colonial states, there has been a push toward decentralisation in Zambia since independence; implementation, however, has lagged due largely to uncertainty on optimal rollout strategies given capacity limitations at the local level. With the change in...

Multimedia Item - Video

Publication - Growth Brief

Despite considerable progress in recent decades, nearly 1 billion people worldwide live below the international extreme poverty line of $1.90 per day. A group that has been particularly hard to reach with anti-poverty programmes are the ‘ultra-poor’. With low assets and few skills, the ultra-poor work largely in insecure wage labour, do not participate in...

Project

While disease transmission of Ebola has largely been brought under control, the epidemic has left deep marks on the Sierra Leonean economy. These effects are thought to be particularly severe for adolescent girls and young women. According to data obtained using high-frequency phone surveys, youth unemployment has soared and non-farm household enterprises, the sector most...

Multimedia Item - Video

Blog post

What is the best strategy for attracting the strongest candidates into government jobs? This widespread challenge is particularly relevant in developing countries, where low skills and motivation among public sector workers often translates into poor-quality essential public services like health and education. Effective governance requires recruiting and retaining people...

Project

Managerial practices are a key determinant of firm productivity, and yet little is known about the managerial capital of the top executives who shape these practices. Using a novel survey instrument, we record with unparalleled detail the activities undertaken by 357 Chief Executive Officers of listed Indian manufacturing firms over a specific, exogenously chosen, window of...

Project

Women in developing countries are disempowered relative to their contemporaries in developed countries. High youth unemployment and early marriage and childbearing interact to limit human capital investment and enforce dependence on men.
In this paper, we evaluate an attempt to jump-start adolescent women’s empowerment in the world’s second youngest country: Uganda....

Project

Evaluation of the BRAC ultra-poor programme in Bangladesh.
Targeting households of ultra-poor women, BRAC's programme has reached 1.6 million households.
Project led to a 37% average increase in annual earnings.
The world’s poorest people lack both capital and skills. They tend to engage in low-skilled wage labour activities that are insecure...

Project

Pakistan faces growing spending needs and must meet them with limited resources. This is particularly the case for provincial governments who have devolved responsibility for service delivery. It is crucial that available resources are spent in a cost-effective manner.
The project’s main goal was to ensure ‘better value for money’ by incentivising procuring...

4 Sep 2014 | Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat, Adnan Khan

Publication - Evidence Paper

In a sizable number of developing countries, the public sector fails to provide many, if not most, critical public goods necessary for economic development. The presence of a well-functioning state is key to encouraging economic growth. Part of this concerns having a public sector that has the capacity to raise revenues and spend them effectively; and that policymakers...

Blog post

Can the world’s poorest people become entrepreneurs? This column outlines results from an evaluation of the Ultra Poor programme in Bangladesh, a scheme that the NGO behind it claims is a staggering success.
From an economist’s point of view, the world’s poorest people typically lack two things: capital and skills. They tend to work for others in jobs that are...

7 Jan 2014 | Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Imran Rasul

Blog post

The civil service – public cadres of bureaucrats, local administrators, teachers and health workers – is a key component of the state's capacity to govern and provide public goods. In the effort to create an effective civil service, states face key questions regarding how to recruit, train and motivate competent agents to ensure their high performance and long-term...

Project

Recent survey evidence shows that the most profitable and productive firms tend to adopt personnel policies that link pay to performance and that firms in low-income countries are less likely to use these “good” human resources management practices. Incentive pay is a key component of management strategy, and yet field evidence on the impacts of both individual and team...

1 Apr 2012 | Greg Fischer, Oriana Bandiera

Project

Incentives in the selection of public service delivery workers are essential to improving their motivation
Researchers used field experiments with community health assistants in Zambia to evaluate different recruitment strategies
Compared to social incentives, career incentives attract more productive applicants
The findings from this project led...